Poem

WCS100L

The Balek Scales, Heinrich Boll’s short story from 1953 about the abuses of the system of serfdom by the nobility, is an anarchist allegory for the abuse of power that is inherent to all unjustified hierarchies.

Akin to The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller also from 1953, The Balek Scales functions as a criticism of a major function of the time in which it was written by telling a story apparently about a time in the past. Miller saw the efforts to root out communists, accurately accused or otherwise, from the government and other theatres of life, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, as a mob effect run entirely out of hand. Accusations of secret communism were being thrown around erroneously to protect one’s own reputation for being a good, patriotic capitalist. Beyond his personal political beliefs not aligning with the extreme anti-communist sentiment, Miller took great issue with the fervid participation in accusation and rhetoric-amplification he saw in many levels of society, not just among government officials. He had submitted a script to a film studio to be produced as a film, and was asked by studio executives to change the villains into communists, from the already non-leftist-favorable choice of corrupt union gangsters (Miller). When Miller refused to make such an adjustment he was told he was pulling out when the studio was trying “to make the script pro-American” (Miller). He credits this as a pivotal moment in his understanding of the widespread nature of the Red Hunt; if he was not actively writing propaganda supporting something he did not believe in, he was to be the outsider, the enemy. Arthur Miller found a parallel in the 17th century panic in Salem, Massachusetts over the apparent presence of witchcraft in the town ("The Crucible Full Text"). The Crucible details a story of Salemites accusing each other in a growing storm of fervor and suspicion, with falsehoods abounding as much as paranoia("The Crucible Full Text") . The comparison to the present time would not have been lost on the audience attending the first performance of The Crucible. Heinrich Boll committed to a similar scheme to innocently but not-clandestinely criticise the two major political structures of the post-war era. His allegory of choice was the early days of industrialism in continental Europe. The hope for a brighter, more developed society was in the minds of most of Europe around the turn of the 19th century. The Bohemian city of Prague was eager to modernize, with the coming of industrial factories and domestic electricity installation by the 1890s heralding a glorious new age of growth to come (Claverie). This hope is paralleled in the 1950s; the world had entered the atomic era, the greatest war ever fought was over and the romance of rebuilding was in the popular imagination, especially to Americans who were seeing by far the largest economic success of any nation (The Postwar Economy). This hope in The Balek Scales is flirted with, but shown to be hollow; the exposition of the failings of old systems should inspire enormous change, but the willingness of the public and the powerful alike to recognize the institutional nature of these problems is unlikely mustered. At the end of the story, nothing changes, the Balek family still has power and the scales are still in use. World War II was fought over fascism; a capitalist society run to its extreme, what Boll seems to believe it be the natural, inevitable conclusion of capitalism, was shown to be dangerous and then crushed, with the first great communist state filling much of its place in Europe (The Postwar Economy).

Boll’s analysis is decidedly anarchic. His criticism of feudalism and serfdom are obviously not directly relevant to the mid-20th century in which he wrote The Balek Scales. By writing on the past as such, he shepherds the reader’s mind to compare this period to their own, and the audience of the day was supposed to draw a very particular parallel, and hence a particular conclusion. The von Balek dynasty in the short story are naturally, obviously the villainous figures. They abuse their power and cheat the peasantry out of enormous sums of money, compounded over decades upon decades. The obvious analogous structure in the 1950s to the Baleks is capitalism, the spiritual successor to feudalism, and definitely Boll’s ideological enemy for the same reasons (Marx, Engels). What is less obvious is his criticism of statist communism. The exploitation of the poor is not just the result of bad actors in a capitalist or feudalist system, which a Marxist reading would dictate to be every actor in a position to potentially exploit the worker; the poor and marginalised are inherently doomed to exploitation by any hierarchy that cannot be justified with a heavy burden of proof for such justification (Parsons).

By comparing the post-war political landscape to a time of transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism, Boll is subtly but unmistakably making two comparisons: the actions of the Baleks to that of the now-exposed flaws of capitalism as seen in fascism, the old; the excitement of industrial capitalism on the rise in the waning days of feudalism in continental Europe to the promise of a worker’s state embodied by the Soviet Union in post-war eastern Europe, the new, the replacement of the old with more of the same in a new dress. Boll understands the root of exploitation not to be an actor in a system, nor the particular system itself: the existence of any system governing this particular aspect of life, in a Boll-ian analysis, is the problem. Justice cannot exist within a state, just as the scales will never be fair in anyone’s hands.

Works Cited CORRECT ORDER

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Origami Books, 2020.

Parsons, Lucy. “The Principles of Anarchism.” The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lucy-e-parsons-the-principles-of-anarchism.

“The Postwar Economy: 1945-1960.” The Postwar Economy: 1945-1960 < Postwar America < History 1994 < American History From Revolution To Reconstruction and Beyond, www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/history-1994/postwar-america/the-postwar-economy-1945-1960.php.

Claverie, Jana and Alena Kubova. Prague. Paris: Vilo Publishing, 2002.

Full Text of "The Crucible Full Text", archive.org/stream/TheCrucibleFullText/The Crucible full text_djvu.txt.

Miller, Arthur, et al. “Why Arthur Miller Wrote ‘The Crucible.’” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible.